George McGovern died today (1992-2012)

It cannot be said that McGovern’s star-crossed 1972 Presidential campaign signaled the death of American liberalism (America’s version of social democracy). That death would finally come when Ronald Reagan demolished the politically conservative Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization in 1981. What his 1972 campaign managed to accomplish was the creation of a potent and enduring symbol, one which encapsulated the political impossibility of liberal reform in the United States. It did not matter a jot that McGovern was not a radical in any way at all. His reform program was quite modest. Yet his defeat at Richard Nixon’s dirty hands was so decisive that it suggested Americans in general would not support the political implementation of a just social order, a project which informed national politics in the prior decade. In this sense it can be said that McGovern’s defeat in 1972 ushered in the Age of Reaction in American politics. It was the watershed moment when the silent majority put down the young upstarts who wanted to run the country. Even the Watergate Scandal — which one might have expected to affirm completely and strongly the leftwing of the Democratic Party and which destroyed the corrupt Nixon Administration as well as the Party-man Gerald Ford — failed to deter the hard right turn made by the American elite after the 1960s. Militarism, predatory economics and social reaction would dominate American politics thereafter.

The 1972 Election remains an active and significant component of America’s political memory. Echoes of Nixon’s victory could be heard in Scott Walker’s decisive victory over Tom Barrett in the Wisconsin Governor’s Recall Election of 2012 and, for that matter, in the public and private despair felt by the Democratic Party left over Barack Obama’s reactionary administration. Both situations reflect the irrelevance of a center-left politics in the United States, a weakness revealed by the 1972 Presidential Election. A Heideggerian might consider this despair to be Uncle Sam anticipating his very death.

George McGovern was considered a decent man. I never met him and cannot confirm this observation from personal experience. But, if McGovern had been a decent man during his long life, we who remain alive might affirm his memory by appreciating the fact that his name will always remain associated with the effort to turn the country away from its self-selected destruction. This will be his posterity.